Bad Advertisement?
Are you a Christian?
Online Store:Visit Our Store
| Chapter V
PREVIOUS SECTION - NEXT SECTION - HELP 
Chapter V.
The illustrious3697
Celsus, taking
occasion I know not from what, next raises an additional objection
against us, as if we asserted that “God Himself will come down to
men.” He imagines also that it follows from this, that
“He has left His own abode;” for he does not know the power
of God, and that “the Spirit of the Lord filleth the world, and
that which upholdeth all things hath knowledge of the
voice.”3698
Nor is he
able to understand the words, “Do I not fill heaven and earth?
saith the Lord.”3699
Nor does he see that, according to the
doctrine of Christianity, we all “in Him live, and move, and have
our being,”3700
as Paul also taught
in his address to the Athenians; and therefore, although the God of the
universe should through His own power descend with Jesus into the life
of men, and although the Word which was in the beginning with God,
which is also God Himself, should come to us, He does not give His
place or vacate His own seat, so that one place should be empty of Him,
and another which did not formerly contain Him be filled. But the
power and divinity of God comes through him whom God chooses, and
resides in him in whom it finds a place, not changing its situation,
nor leaving its own place empty and filling another: for, in
speaking of His quitting one place and occupying another, we do not
mean such expressions to be taken topically; but we say that the
soul of the bad man, and of him who is overwhelmed in wickedness, is
abandoned by God, while we mean that the soul of him who wishes to live
virtuously, or of him who is making progress (in a virtuous life), or
who is already living conformably thereto, is filled with or becomes a
partaker of the Divine Spirit. It is not necessary, then, for the
descent of Christ, or for the coming of God to men, that He should
abandon a greater seat, and that things on earth should be changed, as
Celsus imagines when he says, “If you were to change a single
one, even the least, of things on earth, all things would be overturned
and disappear.” And if we must speak of a change in any one
by the appearing of the power of God, and by the entrance of the word
among men, we shall not be reluctant to speak of changing from a wicked
to a virtuous, from a dissolute to a temperate, and from a
superstitious to a religious life, the person who has allowed the word
of God to find entrance into his soul.E.C.F. INDEX & SEARCH
|
